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Culinary Biographies
Culinary Biographies was created to fill the need for a biographical dictionary of gastronomy. Too often the historic individuals whose work with food was important in their own time have been forgotten today, or, if they do appear in some encyclopedia, are included for their achievements in another field. Thus, Pythagoras' mathematical theories overshadow his vegetarian philosophy, Joel Barlow's diplomatic service has eclipsed his "Hasty Pudding," and Sarah Josepha Hale's reputation is tied up with her magazine's fashion plates (which she disliked) instead of her many cookbooks and household manuals.
This volume remembers these influential persons and their culinary accomplishments with a biography and, wherever possible, a portrait—from Friedrich Accum to Ziryab, from Pythagoras in the sixth century BC to Julia Child in the 21st century, from agriculturalists to poets, and across the globe from America to China.
Among the biographies are famous characters such as the great chef Taillevent; the national cookbook author Pellegrino Artusi; Columella, the teacher of agriculture; the influential artist Rosanjin; Procope the prominent restaurateur; Avicenna the polymath physician who was concerned with diet and health; and the sensual writer M.F.K. Fisher. But there are also many others, less well known, whose stories are both entertaining and informative—and very well told by the contributors!
The biographies are followed by three indices in which the subjects are listed by name (and variations of their names), by profession and by country. There is a chronological list of significant culinary texts that links the texts to their authors, who can be found in the main body of the book. Our learned contributors are also listed and identified.
- GenresFood
418 pages, Hardcover
First published April 11, 2006
25 people want to read
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April 9, 2021
Cherishing Our Food Heritage
Prof Vinod Huria
Senior Principal Scientist (Superannuated)
CSIR-Central Food Technological Research Institute, Mysore, India
There is a lot more to food than what meets the sensory organs. There is history & geography, economics & politics, and culture & romance. Just reflect on how many wars were fought to gain command over land, the ultimate resource for food production. Food is the universal factor running through all of us and it is woven into our cultural fabric. Culture is what we are and how we live, eat, dress and utilize our leisure in creating works of art and fashion. Just as culture has undergone evolution through periods of history, so has food. The transformation has come about because of cultural and technological progress, as well as from the understanding of food and its various nuances. The advancement of culture over any era is well documented, but the developments that have taken place in food are not so clearly articulated. As a result, reference books on the history of food are rather few.
Culinary Biographies is an addition to texts that document the history of food. It is a marvelously refreshing book and a delight to read and cherish. The book is structured on the biographies of individuals, who have made a difference to the world of food and culinary art & science. The book ornaments nearly 200 biographical essays on culinary personalities. The biographies bring to life the incredible stories of a diverse group of prominent culinarians, who have ‘influenced the way we eat today’. Elaborating on them, Arndt writes, ‘these were the people whose lives were significantly engaged in growing, manufacturing or preparing foodstuffs; in refining the rituals of its consumption; in researching and improving nutrition and health; in communicating the delight of a good and social meal; or in contemplating the meaning of it all. They also include those called exchangers: people who brought foods or food-ways, to new parts of the world, or others who, in satisfying a country’s repertoire, contributed to the unification of the country itself.’
Since the biographies have been written by a heterogeneous group of individuals, they are bound to be diverse in style and presentation. Nevertheless, each biography is complete in itself including the basic facts about the birth, education, life and the contribution made by the respective biographee to influence and shape the developments in culinary art and science in that age. These biographees hail from nearly 40 countries from across all the continents of the world. While the list of the featured personalities is large, it may be worthwhile to mention a few. Included among the great culinary figures are Betty Crocker, Elizabeth David, Fannie Merritt Farmer, Hanna Glasse, Count Rumford, Alfred A Knopf, Lydia Maria Child, NK Fairbank, etc.
The book includes many European culinary stars from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and Russia. Prominent amongst them are Isabella Beeton, the nineteenth century English cook who wrote ‘Book of Household Management’; La Varenne (François Pierre), the seventeenth century French author of ‘Le Cuisinier francois’. A galaxy of names is included from France, including Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 1961); the novelist and gastronome, Honore de Balzac; and the famous scientist, Louis Pasteur, from whose name has been derived the term pasteurization. The list from Europe also includes Norway's first culinary star, Henriette Schönberg Erken, and the German cookbook author Erna Horn. The biography of Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets is important from the Russian context, as her book ‘A Gift to Young Housewives’, first published in 1861, became Russia's most popular cookbook. Other prominent Russian biographies are those of Nikolai Gogol, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, VV Pokhlebkin and Marx Rumpolt.
While western foods are well known to the world, cuisine from the eastern world is less illustrious. Chinese and Japanese biographees notably feature in this book. Minekichi Akabori, the Japanese author of ‘Home Recipes for Twelve Months’ (1904), Buwei Yang Chao, the author of ‘How to Cook and Eat in Chinese’ (1945) and Yuan Mei, the Chinese poet and epicure, who lived in the eighteenth century, are some of the Oriental biographees.
Amongst the Indian biographies are those of KT Achaya, Nobin Chandra Das, Minakshie Das Gupta, Bipradas Mukhopadhyay and Kundan Lal Gujaral. The renowned scientist & nutritionist, KT Achaya, published ‘Indian Food: A Historical Companion’ in 1994, an exemplary work which brought him acclaim and drew the attention of the western world to the history of Indian food. The biography of Nobin Chandra Das traces the development of Bengali cuisine. In 1864, Nobin Chandra Das set up a shop as a confectioner and, in 1868, created the rossogolla, a Bengali culinary delight, prepared from channa. Since then, channa has gained popularity as the building block for a range of delicacies. KC Das, his son, popularized rossogolla by setting up a chain of outlets for marketing this delicacy, throughout India and even abroad.
The book is particularly valuable for its selection of essays devoted to less famous but equally important individuals, such as Abby Fisher and Bessie Baldwin of London. Bessie was one of the first to record the food in Australia and her recipes pre-date the first Australian cookbook printed in 1864. Alice writes that, ‘we were surprised to note how many of our biographees were renowned in their own time, yet had later been almost completely forgotten. The names of the most famous cooks of their day, the most influential writers and thinkers, the most fashionable restaurateurs, often bring blank looks when mentioned today’. Among these are Eliza Acton, the nineteenth-century English cookbook writer who came up with the idea of ingredient lists in recipes; Nicolas-François Appert, who figured out how to preserve food in glass bottles and tin cans, spawning an entire industry; and Count Rumford, a British military officer of the late eighteenth-century, who invented an early form of the convection oven.
One of the book's most beneficial features is its system for cross-referencing. For example, in the entry for Poppy Cannon, contemporaries like James Beard, MFK Fisher and Alice B Toklas are mentioned in bold print, which means that their biography is featured elsewhere. This enables one to skip from biography to biography, building a map of people in the culinary world.
The book has several indexes that help in easy access to subjects and authors in the text. Towards the end, there is a chronological listing of significant culinary texts, beginning 1700 BC with the Babylonian Cuneiform Recipe Collection, and culminating with ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’ authored by Alan Davidson in 1999. These texts narrate the memoirs of food over 3700 years, revealing not just the practice and art of cooking, serving and eating, but also the philosophy, technology and the assortment of foods that have enriched lifestyles and the human gourmet. Arndt has brought together in the book an ambitious genre of luminaries, encompassing not just those who made food, but those who grew, ate, celebrated or wrote about it. These, she reasoned, were the personalities who wove the true fabric of the history of food.
The editing of manuscripts on biographies, written by a stellar group of scholars, scientists and historians from across the globe is a mammoth task. Arndt has worked hard to make the book as authentic as possible. Like any editor of a major work, she faced the challenge of applying her cutting edge to condense & refine the text, which has made this book really crisp. Culinary Biographies is a commendable book that unfolds the saga of food that our ancestors have passed down through the ages, from the Babylonian civilization to the present time. Alice Arndt has brilliantly disclosed to us the vast fountain of knowledge that exists on food. With biographies penned by eighty-eight contributors, the book is a delight to read. It contains precious knowledge to merit its place in renowned culinary reference collections. This book will be a priceless asset to every home that is inclined to value the cultural heritage of food from across the world.
Prof Vinod Huria
Senior Principal Scientist (Superannuated)
CSIR-Central Food Technological Research Institute, Mysore, India
There is a lot more to food than what meets the sensory organs. There is history & geography, economics & politics, and culture & romance. Just reflect on how many wars were fought to gain command over land, the ultimate resource for food production. Food is the universal factor running through all of us and it is woven into our cultural fabric. Culture is what we are and how we live, eat, dress and utilize our leisure in creating works of art and fashion. Just as culture has undergone evolution through periods of history, so has food. The transformation has come about because of cultural and technological progress, as well as from the understanding of food and its various nuances. The advancement of culture over any era is well documented, but the developments that have taken place in food are not so clearly articulated. As a result, reference books on the history of food are rather few.
Culinary Biographies is an addition to texts that document the history of food. It is a marvelously refreshing book and a delight to read and cherish. The book is structured on the biographies of individuals, who have made a difference to the world of food and culinary art & science. The book ornaments nearly 200 biographical essays on culinary personalities. The biographies bring to life the incredible stories of a diverse group of prominent culinarians, who have ‘influenced the way we eat today’. Elaborating on them, Arndt writes, ‘these were the people whose lives were significantly engaged in growing, manufacturing or preparing foodstuffs; in refining the rituals of its consumption; in researching and improving nutrition and health; in communicating the delight of a good and social meal; or in contemplating the meaning of it all. They also include those called exchangers: people who brought foods or food-ways, to new parts of the world, or others who, in satisfying a country’s repertoire, contributed to the unification of the country itself.’
Since the biographies have been written by a heterogeneous group of individuals, they are bound to be diverse in style and presentation. Nevertheless, each biography is complete in itself including the basic facts about the birth, education, life and the contribution made by the respective biographee to influence and shape the developments in culinary art and science in that age. These biographees hail from nearly 40 countries from across all the continents of the world. While the list of the featured personalities is large, it may be worthwhile to mention a few. Included among the great culinary figures are Betty Crocker, Elizabeth David, Fannie Merritt Farmer, Hanna Glasse, Count Rumford, Alfred A Knopf, Lydia Maria Child, NK Fairbank, etc.
The book includes many European culinary stars from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and Russia. Prominent amongst them are Isabella Beeton, the nineteenth century English cook who wrote ‘Book of Household Management’; La Varenne (François Pierre), the seventeenth century French author of ‘Le Cuisinier francois’. A galaxy of names is included from France, including Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 1961); the novelist and gastronome, Honore de Balzac; and the famous scientist, Louis Pasteur, from whose name has been derived the term pasteurization. The list from Europe also includes Norway's first culinary star, Henriette Schönberg Erken, and the German cookbook author Erna Horn. The biography of Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets is important from the Russian context, as her book ‘A Gift to Young Housewives’, first published in 1861, became Russia's most popular cookbook. Other prominent Russian biographies are those of Nikolai Gogol, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, VV Pokhlebkin and Marx Rumpolt.
While western foods are well known to the world, cuisine from the eastern world is less illustrious. Chinese and Japanese biographees notably feature in this book. Minekichi Akabori, the Japanese author of ‘Home Recipes for Twelve Months’ (1904), Buwei Yang Chao, the author of ‘How to Cook and Eat in Chinese’ (1945) and Yuan Mei, the Chinese poet and epicure, who lived in the eighteenth century, are some of the Oriental biographees.
Amongst the Indian biographies are those of KT Achaya, Nobin Chandra Das, Minakshie Das Gupta, Bipradas Mukhopadhyay and Kundan Lal Gujaral. The renowned scientist & nutritionist, KT Achaya, published ‘Indian Food: A Historical Companion’ in 1994, an exemplary work which brought him acclaim and drew the attention of the western world to the history of Indian food. The biography of Nobin Chandra Das traces the development of Bengali cuisine. In 1864, Nobin Chandra Das set up a shop as a confectioner and, in 1868, created the rossogolla, a Bengali culinary delight, prepared from channa. Since then, channa has gained popularity as the building block for a range of delicacies. KC Das, his son, popularized rossogolla by setting up a chain of outlets for marketing this delicacy, throughout India and even abroad.
The book is particularly valuable for its selection of essays devoted to less famous but equally important individuals, such as Abby Fisher and Bessie Baldwin of London. Bessie was one of the first to record the food in Australia and her recipes pre-date the first Australian cookbook printed in 1864. Alice writes that, ‘we were surprised to note how many of our biographees were renowned in their own time, yet had later been almost completely forgotten. The names of the most famous cooks of their day, the most influential writers and thinkers, the most fashionable restaurateurs, often bring blank looks when mentioned today’. Among these are Eliza Acton, the nineteenth-century English cookbook writer who came up with the idea of ingredient lists in recipes; Nicolas-François Appert, who figured out how to preserve food in glass bottles and tin cans, spawning an entire industry; and Count Rumford, a British military officer of the late eighteenth-century, who invented an early form of the convection oven.
One of the book's most beneficial features is its system for cross-referencing. For example, in the entry for Poppy Cannon, contemporaries like James Beard, MFK Fisher and Alice B Toklas are mentioned in bold print, which means that their biography is featured elsewhere. This enables one to skip from biography to biography, building a map of people in the culinary world.
The book has several indexes that help in easy access to subjects and authors in the text. Towards the end, there is a chronological listing of significant culinary texts, beginning 1700 BC with the Babylonian Cuneiform Recipe Collection, and culminating with ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’ authored by Alan Davidson in 1999. These texts narrate the memoirs of food over 3700 years, revealing not just the practice and art of cooking, serving and eating, but also the philosophy, technology and the assortment of foods that have enriched lifestyles and the human gourmet. Arndt has brought together in the book an ambitious genre of luminaries, encompassing not just those who made food, but those who grew, ate, celebrated or wrote about it. These, she reasoned, were the personalities who wove the true fabric of the history of food.
The editing of manuscripts on biographies, written by a stellar group of scholars, scientists and historians from across the globe is a mammoth task. Arndt has worked hard to make the book as authentic as possible. Like any editor of a major work, she faced the challenge of applying her cutting edge to condense & refine the text, which has made this book really crisp. Culinary Biographies is a commendable book that unfolds the saga of food that our ancestors have passed down through the ages, from the Babylonian civilization to the present time. Alice Arndt has brilliantly disclosed to us the vast fountain of knowledge that exists on food. With biographies penned by eighty-eight contributors, the book is a delight to read. It contains precious knowledge to merit its place in renowned culinary reference collections. This book will be a priceless asset to every home that is inclined to value the cultural heritage of food from across the world.
February 16, 2011
I bought this book as a Christmas present for a friend who owns a successful restaurant, but I couldn't give it away! In addition to insights into the lives of the names you would expect like Julia Child and Fannie Farmer, there are dozens of people who made major contributions and lead amazing lives. Diplomats who wooed royalty with cooking, doctors who wrote cookbooks, ancients who wrote the first cookbook in their native language, the list goes on. Most biographies are a page or less, a few are two pages. I finally did give the book away in mid February, but now I need to buy another copy since I can't stop talking about the people in it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews